WordPress for beginners – building your first website

WordPress is Free!

WordPress is open source software that has been built by thousands of developers with the main aim of providing a platform that is easy to use for non technical people. You can even put your site online for free at https://wordpress.com but you may want to look into hosting your installation and purchasing a domain first.

It’s easy to use out of the box!

WordPress is a Content Management System (CMS). This means that you are able to login as a site administrator and make changes that will affect how the website looks/ behaves. With a fresh install of WordPress you are already able to start adding content, creating pages and updating how the site looks.

It’s highly customisable (and you don’t need to code)

Your WordPress site can be anything you want it to be. You don’t need to know how to code and there is plenty of great documentation out there to help you customise and make the most of your WordPress website. WordPress was created with customisation in mind. There is an officially supported plugin repository in which you can search for ways to add functionality to your website. At the time of writing this article WordPress boasts 55,541 plugins available for download.

You won’t want or need all of these plugins. However the more downloads the plugin has the more likely it is that you will want to use it. There are 35 plugins with over 1 million downloads available. Plugins come with installation instructions and details on how to utilise the plugins’ functionality.

Your website will look great!

There are a lot of free “themes” out there that you can install on the site to change the way it looks/ feels. There are plenty of other premium themes available too! Because of the popularity of WordPress you are spoilt for choice whilst browsing through sites like https://themeforest.net/.

WordPress is the most popular CMS!

There are plenty of reasons to have a WordPress website which is why it’s the most popular CMS available. In fact in the top 1,000,000 CMS websites (based on traffic) WordPress makes up a staggering 31.91% (source: https://trends.builtwith.com/cms).